One fake certificate. Three countries. 95 companies wound up.
Retail investors are shown a genuine company registration number on an FCA-branded certificate — and mistake it for a licence. They check the number themselves. It's real. They pay anyway.
Who is affected
Retail investors
First-time and multilingual investors, targeted via WhatsApp, Telegram, social ads, and influencer promotion.
The mechanism
A$35.9M
Claimed by ~1,500 investors in 14 countries against a "pig-butchering" network of 95 companies — QRS Global Pty Ltd among them — all wound up by the Federal Court.
Why it matters
0.09%
A$33,018 — all the assets the liquidators found across those 95 companies. Detection before payment is the only point where protection works.
AslanXSource: ASIC v 24-U Pty Ltd [2025] FCA 321
03 Exhibit A — what investors were shown
Four "licences". Not one of them is a licence.
Shown as QRS's FCA licence. The Thai status line reads "General registration". The "regulatory number" 16523636 is the Companies House incorporation of 17 Jun 2025 — the FCA Register has no record of it. The card carries a WikiFX seal. · qrsfx.com, archived 11 May 2026 (Internet Archive)
New Zealand company extract QRS GLOBAL LIMITED, 5981047. A company registration, not a financial licence.Mohéli (Comoros) certificate QRS GLOBAL LLC. An offshore brokerage licence — the Comoros address on the globe slide.US FinCEN card, marked "Regulated" QRS GLOBAL LLC. FinCEN registration is not a licence or an endorsement.
AslanXqrsfx.com About page via web.archive.org · Companies House · FCA Register
04 This is not one bad actor
QRS is one node. The network is $114 billion.
QRS Global's Bangkok operation and DSI arrest sit inside a named, mapped criminal ecosystem — not an isolated incident.
2025 losses, one region
$88.3–114.1B
Scam-offence losses across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand in 2025 alone — up from $18–37B in 2023.
People forced to run it
300,000+
Trafficked or coerced into scam compounds across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines — QRS's own Bangkok ops among them.
Where victims come from
80+ countries
Retail investors targeted, and trafficked workers sourced, from over 80 nations — the same pattern this deck's flagship case shows in miniature.
AslanXUNODC, "An Interconnected Criminal Ecosystem" (Jul 2026) · IOM
05 Solution Summary — PS1
Paste it. We check the real register.
AslanX addresses PS1 — helping retail investors build the skills to identify and avoid AI-enabled fraud — by making verification a five-second reflex instead of a research project.
Problem statement
PS1
Retail investors build skills to identify and avoid AI-enabled fraud and scams.
Proposed approach
Paste → Verify → Act
Any promo text, message or URL goes to a structured AI read, cross-checked live against the FCA Register — not just pattern-matched.
Expected outcome
Verdict + evidence
A plain-English verdict backed by a verification trail the investor — or a regulator — can independently check.
AslanXregister.fca.org.uk · live API
06 Solution Detail
What we built, and what the AI actually does
No inflated agent theatre. Every step on this slide is a real, live network call for any text a user pastes.
What the team built
Three modes in one app — Investor (paste-and-check), Expert (entity graph + 3D threat globe), Regulator (case file, timeline, evidence export).
A verification trail — a literal, linkable checklist of what was independently confirmed. The stage names on screen (Scout → Trace → Lex → Sentinel) label steps of one pipeline, not four autonomous agents.
"QRS Global is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)... Regulatory number: 16523636... guaranteed profit of 20–30% within 7 days..."
96
HIGH RISK — Registration-as-licence fraud
FCA Register: "Firm not found" for 16523636 · "No search result" for "QRS Global". The number is a genuine UK company registration — not a financial licence.
VERIFIED CASE RECORD Shown from a record checked against Companies House, the FCA Register, DSI and ASIC on 2026-09-14 — not re-analysed just now.
Speaker cue: QRS sample chip → instant verdict, labelled VERIFIED CASE RECORD → Regulator case file (DSI/ASIC cross-references) → then run the clone-firm and legitimate-firm chips to show the FCA Register lookup firing live.
Auto-rotating · same projection as the live Expert-mode Threat Globe. Every pin is a real address from the case file — a US host, a London shell, Bangkok operations, a Comoros address, a wound-up Sydney entity.
AslanXGlobeView.jsx · geolocated case nodes
10 How the money moved — fan-in queue
Every victim flows into one throttled gate
Pattern: fan-in queue / bottleneck. Money enters at high rate from three channels; the withdrawal gate is throttled to near zero — that throttle is the fraud.
AslanXFanInQueue.jsx · driven by QRS Global case data
11 Where the money went
A$35.9M claimed. A$33,018 found. 0.09%.
The assets band is drawn at a 4px floor, not to scale — at true scale it would be invisible. Same diagram as the live Regulator-mode Sankey: flat fills, one accent colour for the editorial point, nothing embellished.
AslanXSankeyFlow.jsx · ASIC v 24-U Pty Ltd [2025] FCA 321
12 Evaluation
Verified against three regulators, independently
This is not a synthetic scenario. Every red flag AslanX surfaces is checkable against a primary source.
DSI · Thailand — arrest, 15 Jul 2026, special case 92/2569 (photo: DSI)FCA · UK — Register search "QRS Global": no results (23 Sep 2026)ASIC · Australia — [2025] FCA 321, schedule of parties: Eighteenth Defendant
Expected outcome
Detect a fraud typology that survives a manual company-number check — the hardest case, by design.
Operator arrested (DSI 92/2569); company wound up by Federal Court (ASIC v 24-U [2025] FCA 321).
AslanXAddresses PS1 · detection before payment
13 Deep Dive
The trap: checking the number is what fools you
Outstanding feature
Registration-as-licence detection. Most scam checkers look for fake numbers. QRS Global's number is real — Companies House 16523636 — printed on a FCA-branded certificate. AslanX is built to catch the harder lie: a true fact, misapplied.
Complex obstacle overcome
A prompt bug meant claimedFrn only extracted a number when phrased as "FCA authorisation" — so the live FCA check, the demo's strongest signal, silently never ran. Fixed to extract any claimed regulatory reference, in any language, and flag the mismatch explicitly.
2025-06-17
UK company incorporated
QRS GLOBAL LTD registered at a shared virtual office — no FCA application ever filed.
2025-03-21
Federal Court orders winding up
ASIC v 24-U Pty Ltd [2025] FCA 321 — QRS Global Pty Ltd, 18th of 95 defendants, wound up as scam infrastructure.
2026-07-15
DSI arrests the operator
Case 92/2569, Bangkok. Bail refused. 500+ complainants in the wider probe.
AslanXSources: [CH] [FCA] [DSI] [ASIC]
14 On the record
Not a hypothetical. It's on the public record.
Reported and prosecuted across three jurisdictions — this is the primary-source record AslanX's verdict is built on.
dsi.go.th
DSI press release, 15 Jul 2026 — owner of broker QRS arrested, special case 92/2569.
AslanXEvery link independently verifiable — none behind an AslanX login
15 Looking to the Future
From one register to every IOSCO member
The architecture already separates typology detection from jurisdiction data — the register, the language, the reporting route are all swappable inputs, not hard-coded assumptions.
Next — coverage
Add IOSCO member registers and warning lists beyond the FCA, so the same "paste and check" reflex works wherever an investor is.
Next — reliability
Repair the FCA warning-notices feed (currently returning 404) and add monitored uptime for every upstream regulator API.
Next — scale
Replace seeded case data with live victim-report intake, so the evidence base grows with every investor who checks before paying.
![Schedule of parties, ASIC v 24-U Pty Ltd [2025] FCA 321: Eighteenth Defendant QRS GLOBAL PTY LTD (ACN 665 543 966).](pitch/asic-fca321-schedule.jpg)
